escapade: n. a piece of daring or reckless behaviour. How many times have you been labelled as mad or reckless because you homeschool?
Well I say its time to break down those notions - Bring on the Madness !

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Friday, 20 April 2012

Botany Week 4 - Pollination and seed dispersal

For Botany this week we studied pollination - looking at why pollinators are attracted to flowers,

how the pollen gets transferred between plants (Sunflower was our pollinator in this photo, with some sticky tape on her finger)

and looked at the different types of pollinating animals. We also looked at the stages of plant fertilisation.

We followed this by looking at the different methods of seed dispersal. I tried to get a real life example as well as a hands on example (so Velcro dots to demonstrate how burrs work)

Zoochory - dispersal via animals (i.e. burrs that stick to an animals fur, seeds that pass through the gut and animals burying nuts for later consumption)

Anemochory - wind dispersal (like dandelion seeds blown by the wind and maple seed helicopters) The balloon was filled with flour so they could see how it would disperse when the 'seed pod' burst and the grass had some flour on that they could blow.

They did make paper helicopter seeds - unfortunately I didn't have a real life example for this one but I think they got the idea

Hydrochory - water dispersal (seeds that float on currents to new locations.)